My View: America? vs America

The New York Times vs. America
By Michelle Malkin

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/ 2005 was a banner year for the nation's Idiotarian newspaper of record, The New York Times.
What's "Idiotarian"? Popular warblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media coined the useful term to describe stubborn blame-America ideologues hopelessly stuck in a pre-September 11 mindset. The Times crusaded tirelessly this year for the cut-and-run, troop-undermining, Bush-bashing, reality-denying cause. Let's review:
On July 6, Army reserve officer Phillip Carter authored a freelance op-ed for the Times calling on President Bush to promote military recruitment efforts. The next day, the paper was forced to admit that one of its editors had inserted misleading language into the piece against Carter's wishes. The "correction":
"The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, 'Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,' nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a 'surprise tour of Iraq.' That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error."
Carter told Times ombudsman Byron Calame: "Those were not words I would have said. It left the impression that I was conscripted" when, in fact, Carter volunteered for active duty.
Funny how the "production errors" of the Times' truth doctors always put the Bush administration and the war in the worst light.
Not content to meddle with the words of a living soldier, the Times published a disgraceful distortion of a fallen soldier's last words on Oct. 26. As reported in this column and in the news pages of the New York Post, Times reporter James Dao unapologetically abused the late Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, whose letter to his girlfriend in case of death in Iraq was selectively edited to convey a bogus sense of "fatalism" for a massive piece marking the anti-war movement's "2,000 dead in Iraq" campaign. The Times added insult to injury by ignoring President Bush's tribute to Starr on Nov. 30 during his Naval Academy speech defending the war in Iraq.
After Starr died, Bush said, "a letter was found on his laptop computer. Here's what he wrote. He said, '[I]f you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq. I don't regret going. Everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these people so they can live the way we live, not to have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. Others have died for my freedom; now this is my mark.'"
Stirring words deemed unfit to print by the Times.
The Times did find space to print the year's most insipid op-ed piece by paranoid Harvard student Fatina Abdrabboh, who praised Al Gore for overcoming America's allegedly rampant anti-Muslim bias by picking up her car keys, which she dropped while running on a gym treadmill:
" . . . Mr. Gore's act represented all that I yearned for — acceptance and acknowledgment. . . . I left the gym with a renewed sense of spirit, reassured that I belong to America and that America belongs to me."
I kid you not.
In June, Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of downed American Airlines Flight 77, blew the whistle on plans by civil liberties zealots to turn Ground Zero in New York into a Blame America monument. On July 29, the Times editorial page, stocked with liberals who snort and stamp whenever their patriotism is questioned, slammed Burlingame and her supporters at Take Back the Memorial as "un-American" — for exercising their free speech rights.
Yes, "un-American." This from a newspaper that smeared female interrogators at Guantanamo Bay as "sex workers," sympathetically portrayed military deserters as "un-volunteers," apologized for terror suspects and illegal aliens at every turn, enabled the Bush Derangement Syndrome-driven crusade of the lying Joe Wilson, and recklessly endangered national security by publishing illegally obtained information about classified counterterrorism programs.
So, which side is The New York Times on? Let 2005 go down as the year the Gray Lady wrapped herself permanently in a White Flag.

REVIEW & OUTLOOKThank You for WiretappingWhy the Founders made presidents dominant on national security.Tuesday, December 20, 2005 12:01 a.m.Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold wants to be President, and that's fairenough. By all means go for it in 2008. The same applies to Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who's always on the Sunday shows fretting about the latest criticism of the Bush Administration's prosecution of the war on terror. But until you run nationwide and win, Senators, please stop stripping the Presidency of its Constitutional authority to defend America.That is the real issue raised by the Beltway furor over last week's leak ofNational Security Agency wiretaps on international phone calls involving alQaeda suspects. The usual assortment of Senators and media potentates is howling that the wiretaps are "illegal," done "in total secret," andthreaten to bring us a long, dark night of fascism. "I believe it doesviolate the law," averred Mr. Feingold on CNN Sunday.The truth is closer to the opposite. What we really have here is a perfectillustration of why America's Founders gave the executive branch the largest measure of Constitutional authority on national security. They recognized that a committee of 535 talking heads couldn't be trusted with such grave responsibility. There is no evidence that these wiretaps violate the law. But there is lots of evidence that the Senators are "illegally" usurping Presidential power--and endangering the country in the process.The allegation of Presidential law-breaking rests solely on the fact thatMr. Bush authorized wiretaps without first getting the approval of the court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But no Administration then or since has ever conceded that that Act trumped a President's power to make exceptions to FISA if national security required it. FISA established a process by which certain wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps could ever be allowed.The courts have been explicit on this point, most recently in In Re: SealedCase, the 2002 opinion by the special panel of appellate judges established to hear FISA appeals. In its per curiam opinion, the court noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal "court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue [our emphasis], held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." And further that "we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."On Sunday Mr. Graham opined that "I don't know of any legal basis to goaround" FISA--which suggests that next time he should do his homework before he implies on national TV that a President is acting like a dictator. (Mr. Graham made his admission of ignorance on CBS's "Face the Nation," where he was representing the Republican point of view. Democrat Joe Biden was certain that laws had been broken, while the two journalists asking questions clearly had no idea what they were talking about. So much for enlightening television.)The mere Constitution aside, the evidence is also abundant that theAdministration was scrupulous in limiting the FISA exceptions. They appliedonly to calls involving al Qaeda suspects or those with terrorist ties. Farfrom being "secret," key Members of Congress were informed about them at least 12 times, President Bush said yesterday. The two district court judges who have presided over the FISA court since 9/11 also knew about them.Inside the executive branch, the process allowing the wiretaps was routinely reviewed by Justice Department lawyers, by the Attorney General personally, and with the President himself reauthorizing the process every 45 days. In short, the implication that this is some LBJ-J. Edgar Hoover operation designed to skirt the law to spy on domestic political enemies is nothing less than a political smear.All the more so because there are sound and essential security reasons forallowing such wiretaps. The FISA process was designed for wiretaps onsuspected foreign agents operating in this country during the Cold War. Inthat context, we had the luxury of time to go to the FISA court for awarrant to spy on, say, the economic counselor at the Soviet embassy.In the war on terror, the communications between terrorists in Frankfurt and agents in Florida are harder to track, and when we gather a lead theresponse often has to be immediate. As we learned on 9/11, acting withdispatch can be a matter of life and death. The information gathered inthese wiretaps is not for criminal prosecution but solely to detect anddeter future attacks. This is precisely the kind of contingency for whichPresidential power and responsibility is designed.What the critics in Congress seem to be proposing--to the extent they'veeven thought much about it--is the establishment of a new intelligence"wall" that would allow the NSA only to tap phones overseas while the FBIwould tap them here. Terrorists aren't about to honor such a distinction. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," before 9/11 "our intelligence agencies looked out; our law enforcement agencies looked in. And people could--terrorists could--exploit the seam between them." The wiretaps are designed to close the seam.As for power without responsibility, nobody beats Congress. Mr. Bush haspublicly acknowledged and defended his decisions. But the Members ofCongress who were informed about this all along are now either silent orclaim they didn't get the full story. This is why these columns have longopposed requiring the disclosure of classified operations to theCongressional Intelligence Committees. Congress wants to be aware ofeverything the executive branch does, but without being accountable foranything at all. If Democrats want to continue this game of intelligence and wiretap "gotcha," the White House should release the names of everyCongressman who received such a briefing.Which brings us to this national security leak, which Mr. Bush yesterdaycalled "a shameful act." We won't second-guess the New York Times decision to publish. But everyone should note the irony that both the Times and Washington Post claimed to be outraged by, and demanded a special counsel to investigate, the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, which did zero national security damage.By contrast, the Times' NSA leak last week, and an earlier leak in theWashington Post on "secret" prisons for al Qaeda detainees in Europe, arelikely to do genuine harm by alerting terrorists to our defenses. If morereporters from these newspapers now face the choice of revealing theirsources or ending up in jail, those two papers will share the Plame blame.The NSA wiretap uproar is one of those episodes, alas far too common, that make us wonder if Washington is still a serious place. Too many in the media and on Capitol Hill have forgotten that terrorism in the age of WMD poses an existential threat to our free society. We're glad Mr. Bush and his team are forcefully defending their entirely legal and necessary authority to wiretap enemies seeking to kill innocent Americans.Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

February 06, 2006
Troubled "Times"
Chuck Busch
The New York Times seems to have fallen upon troubled times in this era of global conflict suffering from an internal disorder of its own making. This is not just a reference to the fact that its readership is declining, although that may be a consequence directly attributable to their editorial confusion. The most recent manifestation of their malady was their announcement to the world of the government’s secret “terrorist surveillance” program which has released a firestorm of disinformation, exaggeration, lies, controversy, division and the most amazing hypocritical statements about the legality of such a practice much to the ecstatic enjoyment of our enemies and to their advantage in countering our security measures. On December 15, The New York Times released a report entitled, “Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the U.S.” deliberately misrepresenting the true nature of the program and its legality. It did not entail comprehensive “domestic spying” as the story suggests and it was not secret to several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And now thanks to the Times, it is no longer secret to Al Qaida operatives in this country and at large. In an investigation of the NSA program, Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss told the same Senate committee, “The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission.” According to Goss, intelligence officers from other countries are wondering, “Can’t you Americans keep a secret?”The NYT apparently has no ethnical or nationalistic qualms about giving aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of war. They have chosen reckless reaction to politically charged news events over responsible reporting. They prefer political patronage to patriotic participation. They favor the publisher’s political interests over the public’s interest. In seeming oblivion to the very real and perhaps imminent threat to the nation’s and their own personal security, the New York Times managers dutifully and deliberately chose to expose NSA activity in tracking terrorist suspects. Besides the suicidal nature of such dysfunctional behavior, what is most alarming is the patently arrogant attitude with which they promote these treasonous acts against their own government. Times management very smugly stated that they reviewed the legal aspects of the content of this report and determined that there would be no harm in its release. Who are they to decide what information is critical to national security. Does not the designation “classified” already dictate that such information is not for public dissemination? Do Times editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger think that they are above the law? They certainly knew the government did not approve of this disclosure and they spilled it anyway. For them, the only issue was not whether to publish, but when. They sat on the story for over eight months until a book by the author of the article, James Risen, was set to be released. This also conveniently came at a time when the Senate was considering extending the completely successful Patriot Act so crucial to our homeland security. To complete this picture of hypocrisy, NYT’s managers surmised over a year ago that the president’s actions were in fact legal, a direct contradiction of their recent statement that, “Illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties…”Senator John Cornyn of Texas said, “I think it’s a crying shame…that we find that America’s safety is endangered by the potential expiration of the Patriot Act in part because a newspaper has seen fit to release on the night before the vote on the floor on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act as part of a marketing campaign for selling a book.” President Bush said, “As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have. The unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.” It is not just the Times that is affected by this allegiance dysfunction, but sadly, the same condition has spread on an epidemic scale to other major print media sources. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek immediately rushed to the Times defense wildly suggesting that, “We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9-11 gave him license to act like a dictator or, in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.” This is no surprise coming from them. After all, when Newsweek lied about Korans being flushed, seventeen people died in the subsequent rioting. The US News and World Report alluded to methods used by the DOD and the CIA to detect the presence of radioactive materials in passing vehicles. The Washington Post came out with a story alleging a covert CIA program to interrogate prisoners at secret detention centers around the world. Heaven forbid that we might learn something to prevent attacks on our cities and soldiers. Recently the Post featured a callous and tasteless cartoon drawn by Tom Toles depicting a quadriplegic wounded soldier with Donald Rumsfield by his side describing his condition as “battle hardened.” It’s not enough for the Post to continually undermine the Bush administration’s execution of the war against terror, but they also have to disparage the individual soldier as well. These self-righteous journalists enjoying their comfortable and rewarding careers with the Post regard the young men and women who have volunteered to give up everything of their personal lives to participate in bringing stability to the Middle East and security for their families at home as nothing more than political fodder to be exploited in their ideological war against American superiority. I am sure Islamofascists around the world appreciate their witticisms. Worse yet, the symptoms are recurrent. The unrepentant New York Times was again involved in detailing a report that had been illegally leaked from the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which was critical of the effort so far. Why don’t these publications ever report on the progress that is being made in Iraq and the successes in the war with terror? Are they more concerned about the well being of enemy combatants than American citizens? If the New York Times is troubled or confused about its media obligations in a time of war, let them take this piece of advice - passing classified information onto our enemies by publishing leaks of classified information is probably not it. In earlier times, this would be denounced categorically as treason. The editors at the Times should be thankful that the gentlemanly George Bush is in office and not Abraham Lincoln or else they would be viewing the world’s events from behind bars in a federal prison. Reference: U.S. Code under the Espionage Act: Title 18: Section 794 “Gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign governments” “(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempt to communicate, deliver, or transmits, or attempt to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life…”It is absurd to suppose that the Times and other news publications do not understand that words and actions have consequences. The question has to be asked whether they secretly wish for the failure of our national defense policies and demise of this great country. The liberal media may utterly despise the president, but are they so cold as to endanger the safety of American soldiers and civilians just to express their dissatisfaction? Are these precious lives cynically dismissed as mere collateral damage in their private personal war against the twice-elected President George Bush and their all-consuming lust for power?The prognosis for the return of the printed media to objective and patriotic reporting is not good. Perhaps some R & R in a nice secured room is the best cure for their lack of appreciation of who the bad guys are. Hopefully, that mild treatment will be sufficient to bring about recovery as opposed to say a nuclear detonation in a major U.S. city. The stakes are too high to allow these seditious and un-American acts by the media to continue unchallenged. A president trying to protect the American people by wiretapping incoming phone calls to known terrorist suspects is not a scandal. But news agencies relaying classified information to our enemies certainly is and deserves more attention that it is getting. The presidential oath of the United States of America requires that its leader defend the country against threats, both foreign and domestic. It’s time that the Dept of Defense and Justice Dept. invoke the Espionage Act and aggressively pursue criminal investigations of those who divulge classified intelligence and those who publish it.

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my childmay have peace."-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As seen in today's New York Daily News, by 9/11 family members Anthony Gardner & Particia Reilly:

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Memory lapse
By ANTHONY GARDNER and PATRICIA REILLY
Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Congress and U.S. taxpayers gave the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. $2.78 billion to redevelop the World Trade Center site, entrusting them with the duty of building a magnificent memorial to the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. Just months before construction of the memorial is slated to begin, the LMDC is offering the American public a bargain basement version of Michael Arad's "Reflecting Absence."

The LMDC's latest iteration of Arad's design is one that is 31% smaller than the original, and the central waterfalls - the most powerful design feature - will only operate nine months out of the year. LMDC continues to shrink the memorial despite the fact the original design was too small to accommodate the estimated millions who will make a pilgrimage to the site. The memorial is being built with only one way in and one way out, putting the safety and security of future visitors in peril.

It is insulting that with all of the financial resources at its disposal the LMDC would try to foist an ever-shrinking memorial on the American people and then ask them to pay for it.

The fact that LMDC failed to consider the extra costs involved with heating the memorial's massive waterfalls so they may flow in the winter months reflects its gross mismanagement of the redevelopment. As reported in the Daily News, LMDC has misspent millions in tax dollars on projects completely unrelated to Sept. 11, such as giving $10 million to SoHo's Drawing Center and funding the pet projects of wealthy elites who serve on the LMDC board as they continue to shrink the memorial and refuse to pay heating bills.

Take Back the Memorial, an alliance of major Sept. 11 family groups, began at a time when LMDC's lack of focus nearly led to the placement of the International Freedom Center on sacred ground. Now, to the detriment of future visitors to the memorial, it appears that money has followed LMDC's misplaced priorities as evidenced by the allocation of $50 million to an unrelated cultural facility. Millions have also been spent on the Snohetta building design and we still don't know what it will contain, if it is even built at all.

We would like to be able to say that the WTC Memorial Foundation should take over, but some changes need to be made first. The foundation has said that the memorial is the priority, but actions speak louder than words. Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, both members of the foundation's board, have yet to make a personal donation to the memorial.

It seems evident that the cultural facilities, not the memorial, are the true priority of some individuals who have been charged with building the memorial. The majority of Sept. 11 families are withholding donations until America gets a memorial design it deserves, one that preserves our national heritage, provides for the safety of visitors and honors the dead by telling their story without distraction.

We want a memorial that isn't crammed into a basement space, hidden from the light of day. We want public access to the physical remains of the twin tower footprints at bedrock.

The WTC Memorial Foundation must focus its attention on the Sept. 11 memorial. Board members whose priority is not the memorial must be replaced. As long as their focus remains on extraneous cultural matters they will continue to have difficulty raising funds.

LMDC, which must get its priorities straight, would benefit from new leadership. If changes aren't made fast in both the LMDC and the WTC Memorial Foundation, they will not only fail to honor those who died at that site on Sept. 11, 2001, but they will continue to fail us all.

Gardner and Reilly, who lost family members in the World Trade Center attack, are co-organizers of the Take Back the Memorial campaign.

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"Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."Jerry Pournelle

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Samuel Kercheval, 7/12/1816)

I love all who love me. Those who search for me will surely find me. Proverbs 8:17

"The robust American economy is the great under appreciated story of 2005. Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe's story, our superb economy is hidden in plain view, mostly ignored by a media that prefer to accentuate the negative and a Democrat Party that, for understandable partisan reasons, is loath to admit that anything could possibly be right in George Bush's America." —Rich Lowry

"If we allow a guest-worker program to pass, it will be 1986 all over again—amnesty first, enforcement never, and an unending wave of illegal immigration. Strict enforcement is the only way to stop illegal immigration. Sadly, that won't happen until the White House and congressional leaders stop seeing illegal immigration as a political problem to be finessed rather than an invasion to be stopped." —Rep. J.D. Hayworth

"The Washington Post on Friday reported the existence of a massive covert program within the CIA to catch, detain and interrogate terrorists worldwide. Like President Bush's NSA program to eavesdrop on terror suspects without waiting for a warrant from the notoriously sluggish FISA court, the CIA program has drawn its share of short-sighted condemnation, as if 9/11 never happened. Here is how the Post described the nation's ability to gather intelligence on terrorists nearly four and a half years ago: 'The CIA faced the day after the 2001 attacks with few al-Qa'ida informants, a tiny paramilitary division and no interrogators, much less a system for transporting terrorism suspects and keeping them hidden for interrogation.' President Bush changed all that. He has, according to the Post, created the largest covert CIA program since World War II. And it has been highly successful. 'Indeed, the CIA, working with foreign counterparts, has been responsible for virtually all of the success the United States has had in capturing or killing al-Qa'ida leaders since Sept. 11, 2001,' the Post reported. Pardon us if we don't become outraged that the President of the United States transformed a weak CIA into an impressively effective tool for finding and defeating America's enemies." —New Hampshire Union Leader

"I give [the 'Person of the Year Award'] to Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who gave the President a vacation from Hell and brought the war home in a way that it hadn't been before and set the stage for the deceleration in the President's poll ratings." —Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on the "McLaughlin Group"

Gee Eleanor,,you really set your standards high don't you,,,,JF

Reporter Brian Ross: "Mary Mapes was the woman behind the scenes, the producer who researched, wrote and put together Dan Rather's '60 Minutes' report on President Bush's National Guard service, a report which Rather and CBS would later apologize for airing..." Ross to Mapes: "Do you still think that story was true?" Ex-CBS producer Mary Mapes: "The story? Absolutely." Ross: "This seems remarkable to me that you would sit here now and say you still find that story to be up to your standards." Mapes: "I'm perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there's proof that I haven't seen." Ross: "But isn't it the other way around? Don't you have to prove they're authentic?" Mapes: "Well, I think that's what critics of the story would say. I know more now than I did then and I think, I think they have not been proved to be false, yet." Ross: "Have they proved to be authentic though? Isn't that really what journalists do?" Mapes: "No, I don't think that's the standard." —ABC's Good Morning America, 9 November

"The American people feel both domestically and in foreign policy the country is headed in the wrong direction, and the Republican majority just keeps following George Bush in whatever he does. We are focusing on the meat and potato issues that affect Americans, whether it's jobs, or health care, or education, or the high cost of energy, while the present Congress seems to be focusing on issues that special interests like." —Chuck Schumer
**Special interest issues? You mean like national security and the war on terrorism?

"Gun Free" Canada: "[T]he lack of gun laws in the United States is allowing guns to flood across the border that are literally being used to kill people in the streets of Toronto." —Toronto Mayor David Miller, blaming the U.S. for a recent incident in Toronto in which a young girl was killed in the cross-fire between two gangs, who for some reason had guns despite the Canadian ban

"As I've often observed, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government... And liberals aim to keep it that way." —Joseph Sobran

"More than once...I've turned to Howard Dean in desperation, looking for material. On a slow news day, when the usual sources of outrage and farce are tapped dry, Dean is always there: a bottomless well of almost unbelievable quotes. He's as reliable as taxes, and far more amusing. The average 10-minute Howard Dean interview contains more headlines than a month of the Congressional Record. For a journalist on deadline, Howard Dean is like Santa." —Tucker Carlson

YEEEEEHHHHHAAAAAA!!!!!!!

American liberals don't hate Christmas. They live it... American liberals live in a place where it is always Christmas Eve but never the end of the month. They sit, waiting for the gifts of joy and peace to appear beneath their tree, utterly clueless that someone, somewhere has to pay the bill." —Michael Graham

"Variety reported a disappointing Christmas box office Tuesday. Hollywood can only blame itself. When the plot lines include girl meets ape, two gay cowboys, and a singing and dancing Hitler, the Red States are just grateful to have football." —Argus Hamilton

"The privilege of debating our constitutional rights requires first that we be alive. If federal agents want to listen in on suspected terrorists as they plot their next mass murder, please allow me to turn up the volume. Meanwhile, unless I start placing calls to Peshawar using phrases such as 'I want my 72 virgins now,' then I figure I'm safe to make my next hair appointment without fear of exposure." —Kathleen Parker

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution in 1787,
Alexander Tyler—a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh—had
this to say about The Fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy,
(which is) always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage."